Congestion management is an important component of electricity supply that is, in the U.S., typically achieved by operation of a transmission rights market, often purely financial. In principle, financial transmission rights serve market participants attempting to hedge against uncertain, and often sizable, congestion charges. In addition, effective congestion management can make primary energy markets more efficient and can identify areas where transmission investment is needed. The Wholesale Power Market Platform white paper circulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in April 2003 proposes the establishment of receipt point-to-delivery point (PTP) obligations called Firm Transmission Rights (FTRs), if locational pricing is employed in the energy markets. These rights would allow the holder either to collect or pay the congestion rent between the specified point of injection (POI) and point of withdrawal (POW) for each right. This proposal system is similar to the Transmission Congestion Contract (TCC) system employed by the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), which has been operating since the spring of 2000.1 NYISO TCCs are financial derivatives that can be freely traded both by market participants and by speculators. There has been a vibrant, ongoing, but primarily abstract, debate between proponents of a more centralized electricity market design and those who favor a more decentralized approach. The former envision a central scheduling entity (typically an ISO) that usually operates multiple energy markets. By contrast, the latter group's paradigm relies more heavily on bilateral transactions between market participants or on independent markets to ensure efficient operation. Included in the visions are various strategies for collecting and hedging congestion rents, based on tradable transmission rights, which could be rooted in the nodal pricing schema of a centralized market, as with PTP rights, or could be independently based on transmission flows across key bottlenecks, as with flowgate rights. The current paper summarizes Siddiqui et al. (2003) which reports on the first significant empirical analysis to determine whether the three year old NYISO TCC market has been functioning efficiently by analyzing publicly available market price and congestion rent data from the first two years of NYISO TCC market operation. This research indicates that the financial PTP transmission rights auction implemented by the NYISO may not work efficiently, and that rights sold in auctions may be greatly over- or under-priced.